Until recently, the Rue de Rivoli, a major street that cuts across the center of Paris, was filled with cars. But when the pandemic forced the city to shut down in the spring, the majority of the road was turned over to people on bikes. On some days, as many as 20,000 cyclists use the street. But as the end of the pandemic draws closer, the change is going to become permanent.
Rue de Rivoli is just one of several places where the city has redesigned streets in 2020. “Since the end of the first lockdown in May, lots of new bicycle infrastructure has been created in record-breaking time,” says Maximilian Gawlik, an urban planner at L’Institut Paris Region, the regional urban planning agency. More than 30 miles of new bike lanes have been added within the city, and more than 60 miles in the inner suburbs.
Other cities around the world made similar changes because of the pandemic. One database tracking COVID responses lists more than 1,400 actions that have been taken so far. Milan widened sidewalks, lowered the speed limit, and added 25 miles of new bike lanes, with plans to soon add another 35 miles to help fill a gap as fewer people ride trains and buses. Normally, given the slow pace of bureaucracy, it would have taken years to make the same transformation. Bogota, Colombia, added nearly 72 miles of new bike lanes. Other cities, from Berlin to Auckland, New Zealand, added pop-up bike lanes. In the U.S., several cities, including Minneapolis and San Francisco, temporarily closed down streets to make it easier for people to exercise outside while social distancing. Oakland created more than 20 miles of “slow streets” that are blocked off to through traffic, and, like many other cities, let restaurants repurpose parking spaces for outdoor dining. In May, after making 20 miles of streets car-free because of COVID, Seattle announced that its changes would be permanent.
It’s not clear how many of the cities that made temporary changes during the pandemic will make those permanent. But it just takes political leadership, says Mike Lydon, a principle at the firm Street Plans. “There’s nothing physically that should prevent them from making large network based and systemic changes,” he says. “It requires the ability to just commit to it . . . I think city leaders should look at the untapped demand for these types of changes in the use of our streets. I think a lot of times, politically, people think that it’s a small group of vocal advocates who are asking these types of changes, but really, there’s a huge amount of latent demand in cities to repurpose our streets and public spaces to be a lot more accessible and safe. This pandemic has really shone a bright light on that there’s people from all corners of cities who understand and benefit from this and would not like to see these changes rolling back.”